


the mercy of waves

by fleetingblossom



Category: Diabolik Lovers
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-04-22
Updated: 2014-04-22
Packaged: 2018-01-20 09:46:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,834
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1505999
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fleetingblossom/pseuds/fleetingblossom
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sakamaki Subaru remembers who he loved, and who he loves.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the mercy of waves

**Author's Note:**

> Written and finished on April 9th, 2014.

It begins like this:

He clutches the knife until the blood seeps between his fingers, cutting a stretch down his palm, until the blood goes drip drip drip and dots the tile floor, until the blood stains his mother’s long white hair, until she reaches to hold his hand between hers and press it against her cheek.

She smears his blood across her cheekbones like it’s war paint, swiping it across her temple, drawing rough lines with the wide brushstroke of her thumb. For that moment, she is no victim, but instead a virago, a Joan of Arc with wild hair and parched lips parted, an Athena with rubies for eyes.

In his child eyes, wide and round, she looks like a mad woman, the tendrils of her hair more like snakes as she slips her fingers, still red with his blood, against the back of his neck, trailing down his collarbone, marking him, before she grips his hand again, pressing, digging the knife deeper.

“I love you, mother.”

It’s only later, much later, does he realize she did it so he would never forget the pain of being cut, even when the wound heals over without so much as a hint of a scar, his skin smooth and soft. Sometimes, he looks at his hands, palms up, and wonders, the gears of his mind whirring, a quiet hum as he curls his fingers into fists and slams them into the wall.

-

With those same hands, the ones that break and destroy and bleed, he carves birds out of wood, swans with long necks and sloping wings, small hoofed animals with curving backs and spiraling horns. He knows his fingers are more suited for other things, his first work crude and misshapen, but he works the knife over the wood again and again until it becomes something beautiful.

-

Quietly, quietly, he sleeps with his knees to his chest inside the confines of the coffin--if he shrank any smaller, then, he didn’t have to exist. Maybe that was for the best, he thought. Maybe then, she would love him with the sort of love he knew he deserved.

Funny word, deserved was, when he didn’t deserve anything at all.

-

Tea with mother tasted like flowers and spring--Subaru didn’t much care for milk or sugar or honey or what have you. When her hands weren’t shaking she runs her index finger around the chipped rim of her porcelain cup, the bluebird painted on years ago faded with age.

Two sugars, a splash of milk, that’s how she liked her tea. Sometimes, if she weren’t too terribly tired, she would ask him to retrieve the tin of biscuits, never empty, from the top of her vanity table.

He wondered, briefly, who had come to fill that little metal tin with biscuits, when it had only ever been the two of them? They were different every time she decided she wanted biscuits with tea: Paper thin sugar wafers and vanilla rich custard creams, still soft chocolate biscuits and buttery sugar shortbreads that crumbled when he bit down into them.

It’s been years since he’s sat down for tea. Coffee serves just as well of a substitute, the bitter edge without sugar and milk lingering against his tongue, with no sweet biscuits to temper it.

-

She stumbles in the mansion like a lost lamb, eyes bewildered, knees threatening to buckle underneath her as she pulls away from the greedy hands of his older brothers. They dig fingertips into the skin of her neck and whisper low and sweet in the sort of voice that makes toes curl, unabashed in their desire to break her, their eyes lighting up when she trips over her words.

He doesn’t pretend he’s any better than them, though, when she pushes open the door to his room on accident and he pushes her against the wall, wondering how it would be like to taste her blood dripping like rubies down pale skin. When she cries out in pain, his hands gripping her wrists hard enough to leave fingerprints, he’s most surprised of all when he lets go.

That night, he carves a million wooden figurines, wood shaving catching in his hair. He wakes up surrounded by them, and sets them up on the shelf with as much delicacy as he could manage before he crawls his way to the bed, hands shaking as he pulls a blanket over his head.

-

Nights like these, he has dreams of burials, of dirt thrown on to the lid of his coffin, the sides caving in around him. No matter how hard he pushes, his arms give out; soil fills his mouth and he cannot scream.

He does not die, either, and wakes with sweat clinging to his brow, his hair plastered against his neck and smelling faintly of salt. A wood shaving is caught between his lips and he coughs, inhaling more than he exhales.

For the first time in years, he dreams of her.

-

“Your name is Subaru, right?”

He has long forgotten her name, the first one to ever rip open his ribcage and peer inside, even as he places his fingers around her throat and threatens to break her neck. She laughs. He bites his lip until iron is all he tastes and her laughter is no longer bitter.

She was  _is_  limp hair and blue gills, fish scales and siren tongued but not particularly beautiful. He doesn’t think so--her eyes stare and stare and she never lets go, lips parted just slightly, even when she never has anything to say.

Never good at keeping to herself, she puts her fingerprints all over his room, sticking her nose into places where it didn’t belong, prodding, poking. She says his name like a protective charm _Subaru Subaru Subaru_ and kisses the tips of her fingers, waving them at him.

They look like little worms and a shiver runs down his spine, even as she touches her small, warm hand to his shoulder and whispers that she loves him  _I love you_  and maybe he should love her, too.

When she dies, her body is pale and cold, slippery skin marked blue and black from a grip that is not his own, the chains that bit into her wrists from when she was hung upside down to drain like the animal bruising them. She was  _is_  left there by his brother ( _brothers?_ ) like some perverse token of love.

He supposes he doesn’t understand. Perhaps he never will. He thinks he doesn’t want to.

-

Briefly, he thinks about knife marks parallel to her Achilles tendon and letting her bleed out on the floor as he laps up the blood that pools under her ankle, kissing the arch of her foot and worshiping her like the goddess she is.

Artemis, fleet footed, and he will hang her like Cerynitis, even as she runs, her breath coming short. Run, because that is all she can do before her legs give out and he makes a saint out of her.

It’s moments like those where he recoils in disgust and the walls shake, floorboards creaking under the weight of all, _what_ he deserves and what he doesn’t. She stirs awake from under the blankets, bleary eyes and soft voice.

“Subaru?”

Arms opened wide, she lifts the blankets, warmed by her body, thinking he will crawl in beside her and cry. Wordlessly, he traces circles over knuckles that had been bleeding only a moment ago. When he does speak, he breathes her name into her skin and buries his teeth into her neck. 

"Yui."

-

Slowly, she grafts each part of herself under his skin, into his veins, until every word from his lips is her name and his blood sings when her heartbeat flutters in tandem with the way he pretends to exhale.

He doesn’t know how it happens, but he cuts open a vein in his wrist and presses it against her mouth, letting her drink until her body dies a little death and she wakes up begging him to kill her as he whispers her name.

She does not die, and it is all the same when she claws at her flesh, watching it heal over, trying to salvage the remains of her humanity. All he can do is hold her to his chest to tide over her madness as she cries, the angle of her shoulders sharp against his skin.

-

The noise is deafening and he jolts awake, sitting up on the bed before he looks around, groping blindly to try to find her, his lips parted, but she is not there. She stands poised by the bedside, the shattered remains of a porcelain vase at her feet.

When she steps on the fragments, she does not bleed, and he watches with child wonder and worship. Slowly, slowly, she drags a piece of broken china across the center of her palm and smears the blood across his cheek.

“Promise me.” She kisses his hair, her blood crusted against his skin as he brings frail arms to hug her, her body so much smaller than he had remembered it. Mother had always been beautiful, and he revered her in the only way a child could.

He wants to ask her if it will hurt, but she presses a finger to his lips to hush him. Quickly, he learns never to take moments of lucidity for granted, when she stares at him with glass marble eyes and her jaw is set hard, waiting for the right words from him.

“I promise.”

-

This is the first time he opens the door to her room, steps barefoot onto white tile to see the mother who was once a warrior queen and a martyr, her wrists crossed over one another. Once upon a time, maybe she had been beautiful, but she looks at him as a ghost of his memories, fading fast, and he doesn’t know what else to say.

It is surprisingly easy. Her skin is malleable and she doesn’t so much as make a sound. When he closes his eyes, he thinks maybe she flutters against his hand, but when he opens them, she smiles, serene. His vision goes red and she brushes her fingers across his cheeks.

“Mother loves you.”

Hours, days, months, maybe longer, shorter. The blood dries against his skin and he brushes her hair behind her ear. She would have died a saint but he stands up to leave, staring at his hands as he walks away from her.

-

“I love you, Subaru.”

His lips are pressed to a thin line and he tucks his chin against her shoulder, his lips against the skin of her neck. Cold. For a moment, he doesn’t know what to say, the words caught in his throat. Perhaps there were no words there to begin with.

Slowly, he traces the curve of her spine and closes his eyes. He has an eternity to try.

“I love you, Yui.”


End file.
